Set key column options for use in horizontally folded reports, or to tidy repeated rows in tabular data. This is useful when you have several columns which act as the key to the data values (such as Product Id and Month) with repeated values in the outer column. You can blank out the repeating elements, rule across the table when the value changes (e.g. between Products), as well as ensuring that all the key columns are printed at the left of every page of a multi-page report.

• 0 is normal behaviour
• 1 is ‘retain on each page’ when report is folded horizontally
• 2 is ‘merge repeated rows’ in this column
• 4 is ‘add more space before change’ in this column
• 8 is ‘space and rule before change’
• (16 could be ‘pagebreak before change’ – reserved for future extension)
• 32 is ‘column break after me’ signal for wrapping across pages
• (64 is reserved for non-printing columns – future extension)

Simply add the numbers to set any combination of styles:

cbr„0 0 0 0 0 0 0 32 0 0 0 0 0 32
nltKeyStyle cbr+(½cbr)†11 11

See the sample function Folder (in the NewLeaf workspace) for some examples.

Note that as from release 1.6 the ‘merge cells’ switch is supported in Spread as well as List. It compresses out vertical space in the situation where several adjacent columns have wrapped text in merged cells – the tallest cell group sets the row height.